4 ms·

Perhaps I’ve just become “one of those people”, but I honestly think if not for the buzz around the M1 from Apple, we would be seeing a lot more activity on the

Perhaps I’ve just become “one of those people”, but I honestly think if not for the buzz around the M1 from Apple, we would be seeing a lot more activity on the Linux side. “The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.

gentleman11 5y ago
Linux needs killer app equivalents. Many of the foss versions of windows programs have pretty painful UX or are missing key features (eg, smart select in gimp is really frustrating to use vs photoshop or affinity). Foss really needs to start tempting designers to participate more
- willtim 5y ago
  It's worse than that. The desktop efforts are heavily fragmented and arguably the leader, RedHat's "Gnome", while quite polished, is actually quite user hostile (e.g. works very differently to anything else, perhaps to dodge patents; and constantly changes/removes popular features). Linux needs to have a standardised "platform" with stable APIs.
  - techrat 5y ago
    Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything. It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y." If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead. It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      XFCE is honestly a mediocre middle ground between the actual minimalism of a window manager or the better functionality of say kde. Most fragmentation is actually entirely different software with the same end goal as opposed to actual forks and it's not really clear that the developer of foo would have joined forces with the developer of bar had he not started his own project.
      - techrat 5y ago
        Like I said, good luck getting anyone to agree on anything.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    It’s not user hostile, I love gnome. It might slow down if you don’t reboot (could be a hibernation or suspend issue?) but the Ux is great. Windows is a nuisance after using gnome. You do need to install some addons that should be built in
    - willtim 5y ago
      I could not find any add-on (that still works) to give me back my tray icons. Not even Apple would take this feature away.

gentleman11 5y ago

Linux needs killer app equivalents. Many of the foss versions of windows programs have pretty painful UX or are missing key features (eg, smart select in gimp is really frustrating to use vs photoshop or affinity). Foss really needs to start tempting designers to participate more

willtim 5y ago
It's worse than that. The desktop efforts are heavily fragmented and arguably the leader, RedHat's "Gnome", while quite polished, is actually quite user hostile (e.g. works very differently to anything else, perhaps to dodge patents; and constantly changes/removes popular features). Linux needs to have a standardised "platform" with stable APIs.
- techrat 5y ago
  Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything. It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y." If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead. It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    XFCE is honestly a mediocre middle ground between the actual minimalism of a window manager or the better functionality of say kde. Most fragmentation is actually entirely different software with the same end goal as opposed to actual forks and it's not really clear that the developer of foo would have joined forces with the developer of bar had he not started his own project.
    - techrat 5y ago
      Like I said, good luck getting anyone to agree on anything.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  It’s not user hostile, I love gnome. It might slow down if you don’t reboot (could be a hibernation or suspend issue?) but the Ux is great. Windows is a nuisance after using gnome. You do need to install some addons that should be built in
  - willtim 5y ago
    I could not find any add-on (that still works) to give me back my tray icons. Not even Apple would take this feature away.